Opinion
Column

HARPUR

Criminal justice not that just, or humane

Tom Harpur

Tuesday, September 15, 2015
7:26:10 EDT PM

Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks as he announces that the government will introduce legislation to give criminals life sentences with no parole for serious crimes such as murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, and terrorism, in Toronto on March 4, 2015. REUTERS/Mark Blinch

When the leader of a country as richly blessed as Canada begins to talk about the meaning of life, one expects some joy or words of hope. The opposite is the truth.

A government bill known as Life Means Life died on the order paper when the prime minister opened the longest election campaign in our history. Two weeks later, partly as an attempt to deflect voters' attention from media coverage of the Sen. Mike Duffy affair, Stephen Harper resurrected his core message of being the tough-on-crime champion.

Harper's "life means life" is a sinister promise of incarceration without parole for those found guilty of the most heinous crimes. He has promised that, if re-elected, the Tories will change the Criminal Code to ensure murders involving sexual assault, kidnapping, acts of terrorism or the killing of police officers or corrections officers will ensure "such convicts will spend the rest of their lives behind bars where they belong."

"Frankly, any chance of freedom for such a perpetrator betrays Canadians' sense of justice and our faith in the justice system," he warned.

Justice critics and opposition members claim this bellicose stance appears to be aimed more at scoring political points than protecting the public. That's because most dangerous prisoners already are denied parole and held captive for life. They may become eligible for parole after serving 25 years, but they are never released if still considered dangerous by the parole board.

Criminal law experts are unanimous that trying to make the public think the current system somehow leaves us vulnerable is without foundation in fact. Thus, Benjamin Berger, an expert at Osgoode Hall's law school, says the Harper move "comes across as political sleight of hand." It masks the fact the Conservatives have already added dozens of mandatory minimum sentences from drug and gun crimes to sex offences to the Criminal Code.

What is clear is the next government should fix what the Globe and Mail has called Canada's "surprising prison crisis." Most people will be astounded to realize "on any given day in Canada, there are more innocent people in jail than guilty ones."

The reason for this is that more and more people who have been accused of a crime are being held on remand, awaiting their bail hearing or a trial. The fact is 55 per cent of all prisoners in provincial and territorial jails are not behind bars because a court has convicted them of wrongdoing; they're there on remand.

As the Globe notes, it wasn't always this way. In 2001, for example, the majority of prisoners were in jail because they had been legally tried and convicted of a crime and were serving a sentence for it. But with the crime rate dropping, the number of convicted offenders in prison growing and a bottleneck in bail courts, the astonishing injustice of innocents in jail is the result. This is a blatant absurdity, but none of the political parties wants to address it.

Small wonder the John Howard Society has called for a reform of the total bail system.

One of the most alarming trends is the way in which our justice system increasingly mirrors that in the U.S. A good example is our increasing use of the abomination known as solitary confinement.

Countless authorities and human rights organizations have blasted this medieval punishment as unbearable torture. The UN has called such confinement "cruel and unusual punishment," but it is a little known fact that as many as 1,800 prisoners daily are held in solitary confinement in federal or provincial prisons in Canada. The suicide rate for these unfortunates is seven times that of the general Canadian public.